The concept of a document is central to many business operations. A document may be defined as a writing (printed or displayed) which conveys information. Typically, much of the information in a document is conveyed via text. However, documents often include images as well as text. The images may be in the form of graphical information, such as bar charts and pie charts. When documents are created and displayed in a computing environment, the document can also include audio, video and animation to create a multimedia document.
Documents are typically created, stored and manipulated in a computing environment using a word processing software application, such as WordPerfect or Microsoft Word. The word processing application interacts with an underlying operating system, such as OS/2, DOS or Windows in personal computing environments. Word processing and operating systems exist for midrange and mainframe computing environments.
As described above, it is often necessary to incorporate information from other data processing application programs into a document. The other applications may be executing on the same computing platform as the word processing software application, or it may be executing on a different computing platform which is linked via a network. The other application may be a database, spreadsheet, multimedia application, or any other data processing application which can run on a computing platform and which produces data.
Because of the need to incorporate data from other applications into a document, vendors have designed mechanisms for linking a document to other software applications. Unfortunately, these links are typically customized and/or proprietary so that they can only be used to link to specific software applications under specific conditions.
Moreover, existing links do not facilitate refreshing the data which is in the document. For example, upon creation, a document may include data which is obtained from a database. At a later time, upon viewing or printing the document, data in the database may have changed. It is often desired to incorporate the latest data into a document rather than old data. Thus, there is a need to provide a mechanism for refreshing data in a document which is obtained from other applications.
Prior techniques for linking applications to documents include hypertext/hypermedia systems which allow an end user to select a word, phrase or graphical object, and thereby cause one or more associated information entities to be obtained. Unfortunately, hypertext systems are typically hard coded by a software developer and do not allow a document processing system to obtain data from other standard software applications. An example of a hypertext system is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,297,249 to Bernstein et al. entitled "Hypermedia Link Marker Abstract and Search Services", assigned to the Assignee of the present invention.
Other attempts have been made to incorporate data from other applications into documents by establishing proprietary links between computer programs. For example, Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) allows customized links to be created between certain applications and a document using proprietary linking techniques. Other customized linking systems are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,235,701 to Ohler et al. entitled "Method of Generating and Accessing a Database Independent of Its Structure and Syntax"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,263,167 to Conner, Jr. et al. entitled "User Interface for a Relational Database Using a Task Object for Defining Search Queries in Response to a Profile Object Which Describes User Proficiency"; and U.K. Patent Application GB-2 242 293 A to Heninger entitled "Apparatus and Method for Dynamic Linking of Computer Software Components". Unfortunately, while such customized linking schemes may be usable with some software applications, they are not usable with a wide variety of independent personal computer, midrange and mainframe applications which produce data.